SurfiOnline

That’s pretty much all I have to say - It’s been a great year (wait this is the only year this place has been up!).

I’d write more if there weren’t numerous people looking over my shoulder.

So,

See you in 2005!

Well, that time of the year has passed again, Christmas. For me, this year Christmas (or Giftmas as others have called it) was not very “Christmassy”. I don’t know why and hopefully am not turning in to one of those Grinches like the Lord Mayor of Sydney who refused to put together a huge Christmas display because of the fact some people don’t believe in Christmas and would find the festivities and decorations in the city offensive. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t celebrate Christmas that would testify to us celebrating our beliefs. </slight-rant>

Okay, so I didn’t particularly want much this year for Christmas because I don’t have any particular needs although there were a few things I did want (Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Extended Edition and Stargate SG1 Season 4 boxed set), I ended up with the following.

• Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Extended Edition DVD
• Stargate SG1: Season 4 DVD Boxed Set
• 1 Year subscription to Australian PC World
• Some more clothes
• A new hat - with broad edges. Perfect for out in the boat.
• Thongs (the kind you wear on your feat damnit!)
• $30 Coles Myer Gift Card
• $25 Coles Myer Gift Card
• Chocolates!
• $570 worth of computer equipment I bought myself including a 108mbs Wireless AP, new case, new cpu fan, new power supply, thumbscrews, and some SATA drive power cables - all of which is yet to arrive.

I’ve just spent the past 2 days down at the grandparents place down the coast with my cousins and I actually spent most of the time watching SG1: Season 4 on Dad’s laptop - which I decided I would be taking down and which I am currently writing this post on. On the car trip down we listened to songs from the final 12 on Australian Idol using my iPod and FM Tunecaster. Also ended up watching some of Return of the King on the way down on the laptop and one of the episodes of Stargate on the way back. Arrived home to a boiling hot house and an Optus usage meter saying I had used 85% of this months current data allowance.

Anyway, better late than never so Merry Christmas all and incase I don’t post for the new year, then enjoy the last few days of 2004 and party hard on new years eve!

Chris.

Everyone else seems to be doing the definitive “2004 list” posts at the moment, so I figured for my first Christmas and new year on this blog, why not? (Thanks to Michele for the inspiration!)

Best Movie Releases

It’s okay though, we all know the extended edition of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King topped this list, however here i’m talking about releases at the cinema’s.

1. Shrek 2 (Sucker for awesome animation)
2. Exorcist: The Beginning
3. The Village
4. Ocean’s Twelve
5. Without a Paddle

Best Albums (or Soundtracks)

1. Dead Letters by Rasmus
2. How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb by U2
3. Shrek 2 Soundtrack by Various Artists
4. American Idiot by Green Day
5. Franz Ferdinand by Franz Ferdinand

Best Blogs

1. BinaryBonsai
2. Simple Bits
3. redemption in a blog
4. Sillyness Spelled Wrong Intentionally
5. Photo Matt - Unluky In Cards

Best Designs

1. BinaryBonsai
2. Just Watch the Sky
3. Sillyness Spelled Wrong Intentionally
4. From Away
5. Hicks Design

Favourite Posts

1. I can’t believe it’s almost over..
2. Wentworth Falls Observatory (Physics Excursion)
3. My Formal
4. The Village - Review
5. Welcome to 2.5

Events

1. Finishing school
2. Completing my Higher School Certificate (HSC)
3. Starting SurfiOnline, going through nuermous designs and then moving from bBlog to WordPress
4. Taking up XHTML/CSS along with Standards Compliance and Usability in a more serious manner (sound’s sucky but it’s important for me at least)
5. Working on MyBB!

So thats 2004.

I recently came accross this cool thing. It’s called Just Letters and is a Flash based multiuser application where you can move around sets of letters on one of the 4 different “fridges” - Fridge magnets!

It’s pretty hard to write stuff in the fridges with around 50 people because people are just quickly moving stuff around the second you begin to write something. I did manage to write ‘FISHY’ though - one of my other nicknames. See if you can find it on the right.

I’m curious what other people come up with. Alot of people seem to be writing “fuck you” and “loser”. Pitty they are wrecking itby being stupid.

• Just Letters

Okay, well now that the YearCD is out of the way I have a bit more time to work on the things I have wanted to do for a while. This includes a few little changes around here which have now been completed:

• Support for Gravatars - Globally recognised avatars. If you don’t have one sign up. Make sure you use the email address that you post comments with, otherwise it won’t work. It’s a nice idea really.
• Fixed the tabindexes on the comment posting form which Lobster mentioned a while ago and I never really fixed.
• The new “Spam Killed” section over in the right column there is a counter which detects the amount of spam that has been killed by LaughingLizard’s SpamService plugin. Whenever a comment is killed the countter is updated. I’ve been counting the amount of kills since back in November. Please don’t try to test it, as you’ll end up blocking yourself from here and any other blog using the same SpamService plugin and there is no way to remove you from the blacklist.

There are still a few more changes I intend to make over the coming weeks, but make sure you sign up for your Gravatar and become globally recognised!

Where have I been lately? The lack of updates here, my lack of activity on the MyBB forums, MSN Messenger and IRC can all now be explained. Pretty much for the past two weeks, as well as working full-time at Target, I have been developing the Yearbook CD-ROM for my grade, Port Hacking High School Class of 2004. The project itself ended up becoming bigger than I first imagined which is pretty much why I have been so hectically working on it and not pacing myself out. Here i’m going to outline the development, share with you some secrets about the development, as well as provide the first screenshots that school students may see of the CD before it is released to them on Friday 17th December.

The CD, being one to hold student profiles, photos, and other memorabilia submitted by the students in my form (year) had to be something that was simple and easy to use, as well as compatible with as many different setups as possible without many requirements. This ruled out some fancy DirectX idea’s I had and even the idea of building it all in to an executable. I also decided to rule out using Macromedia Flash as there is another requirement for something that I feel is a bit unnecessary. In the end it came down to using XHTML and CSS, along with plain images just saved directly on to the contents of the CD. Why? Because all (most) computers these days have a web browser, the CD will be able to run on different architectures easily, and it should theoretically display correctly on all different setups.

After deciding that the CD was to be using CSS/XHTML, along came the big decision of how to lay out he pages. Frames at one point were an idea, then I came to my senses. Next was fixed width versus liquid width. I ended up choosing to use a fixed with layout that way I could resize all of the submitted photos to a specific resolution and lay them out knowing that they should look the same for once again, all different kinds of machine configurations. A simple layout was designed with a header image at the top, menu below it and the navigation and content following that (as you can see in the screenshot on the right).

To assist with the implementation of student profiles on the CD a series of PHP scripts were developed which were to store the student’s details in a database allowing them to be updated easily then eventually exported to their HTML format for inclusion on the CD. As you can see in the screenshots below, the student listing was grouped by surfname in series of letters, and the actual view profile page contains the profile, phot and links to the next and previous profiles.

The photo albums were another feature generated by the use of PHP scripts to export the HTML, design the thumbnails and thumbnail pages and arrange everything how it should be. Scripts were designed to read the contents (images) of a specific directory then create the necessary thumbnail listing pages and the images for each image in each album. The PHP scripts were also used to resize images larger than 720px down, and generate the thumbnails at a height of 120px.

Deciding what and how to export HTML was another thing. I decided to use the Smarty template engine as it meant I were able to create a few templates containing logic (if, elseif, foreach) code instead of compiling a whole series of templates for little things which could, for example, change from one student’s profile to another. Smarty was used to generate the code for each of the pages, and then using PHP’s file system functions write them to their specific files.
[code]$smarty = new Smarty;
…
$theimage = $smarty->fetch(”gallery_image.tpl”);
$file = fopen(”./photos/$dir/$ext[0].html”, “w”);
fwrite($file, $theimage);
fclose($file);
echo “–Done - wrote $dir/$ext[0].htmln”;
}
unset($smarty);
[/code]

After the pages were exported it only left a few pages such as the Messages and Audio pages to be created by hand which were no large task as they both only contained a few elements and area’s of text within the pages. For the Audio page, I didn’t go over the top - once again pushing the requirements of the CD, instead I just linked each of the songs (which were recorded by students) to their specific MP3 file and provided instructions on what to do if they do not automatically play.

The next step, after cleaning things up was to make the actual CD automatically run in Microsoft Windows. This was very simply done by using the autorun.inf, and a start.bat (which opens the main index page).

autorun.inf
[code]
[autorun]
open=start.bat
[/code]

start.bat
[code]
@echo Loading PHHS Class of 2004 Yearbook CD
@start index.html
@cls
@exit
[/code]

As long as the user has autorun enabled, and a web browser installed they should have no problems starting the CD. However if for some reason it doesn’t automatically start a read me file was included on the CD as well as printed and will be placed in to the plastic sleeves of the CD’s before they’re distributed.

This project to me has been fairly large and a fair amount of time and effort has gone in to it especially dealing with all of the profiles (153) as well as the images (over 400!). It totals to 2,472 files in 30 directories and will occupy about 140mb of space on the CD-ROM - that’s pretty good if you ask me!

Hopefully now that this project is cleared up I will have a bit more time before Christmas to get some of the things done which are on my ever growing list and becoming a bit more active around here again.

Sorry Michael, but today my mother managed to pick up a copy of the Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Extended Edition from my workplace (Target). The offical release date for the DVD’s is tomorrow (10th November) however there was no embargo placed on the item so we were free to sell copies as they arrived in a massive delivery today. So many people have been asking for it, buying it, and also buying the boxed set of all of the trilogy extended editions.

I have a problem though, as it is apparently a Christmas present for me from my parents, i’m actually not allowed to watch it, touch it, or heck, even know where it is! They have NO idea how hard that is going to be, considering it is pretty much the one DVD I have been looking forward to for the entire year. I tried convincing her (my mother) that I would wrap it all back up after I had watched it once (well, okay ripped it and kept a copy on my PC so I could still watch it) and then she could give it to me for Christmas. I also said that I would buy it but she used the excuse “too late, I have already bought it”.

Damn her! She said she’ll be hiding it somewhere where I won’t find it, but just a message for her: She can’t be home 24/7 :D.

Although this has already been posted everywhere else, I guess it won’t hurt to give my little bit on it too.

With only ~14 days until the release of the extended edition of the third and final installment of the greatest film trilogy ever made*, Peter Jackson and New Line Cimena have put up a nice 6 minute preview to the extended edition with a sneak preview of some of the new scenes which did not make it in to the film at the cinema’s but will be featured on the 4 disc DVD set.
—> Watch it on Lord of the Rings.net
—> Download it here

I myself am really looking forward to this release, although not entirely certain of the release date in Australia. (hoping it is the same as the release date in the US) Although I guess seeing as though it will be a Christmas present, I will have to indeed wait until the 25th before I can get my hands on it. Do my parents have any idea just how hard that is going to be?! They’re going to have to do a very good job hiding it because the second they purchase it the temptation will be there for me to go find it and watch it.

As usual, it’s the four disc set with discs one and two containing the extended edition of the film and three and four containing the wrap up to the appendices - the making of.

Argh, i’m soo looking forward to this!